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Make my own avatar?

Here's how to put up an avatar (that little picture under your name) that you like. It could be your club logo, it could be a picture of you on your bike, it could be a big scary fish, it's up to you.

First off - find a picture you like. I found my avatar, by doing a search at Google for kielbasa and clicking on the tab marked images. I found lots of pictures of kielbasa.

I found one I liked and then right clicked on it. On the menu that popped up, I selected "Save Picture As" and saved the picture to my desktop.

To tell if it was too big, I highlighted the file (now living on my desktop) and right clicked. I then selected "Properties" from the menu and looked at the "Summary" tab. Be sure you have "Advanced" displayed. If you look, you'll see that Windows will show you how wide and tall the picture is in pixels.

My image was a little too large and the maximum size for an avatar is 70 x 70 pixels.

To shrink my picture to the right size, I used Irfanview, which is free and available at Irfanview.com .

In Irfanview, I opened my picture and used Image>Resize and Resample to change the size.

I then saved the picture as kbasaavatar.jpg. My avatar was ready to upload.

I then clicked on the User C.P. button at the top of the screen and went to "Edit Options". Down at the bottom of the screen is a way for you to load your own image from your computer to use as your avatar.

And now you're done. A copy of your avatar is safely living up on the Bulletin Board's server. You can keep your copy in a safe place.

If you have questions, send me an email and I'll try and get you squared away.

Another tip on avatars and the use of irfanview, is to use the crop function to grab just a piece of a larger image (square, preferably), pull down the Edit menu and select Crop, then go about resizing it to the 70x70 pixel limit.

Step 1: Find an image you want to make an avatar out of. I like this one, but there's so much stuff in the photo, that it would look way too busy if I just resized it down to avatar size.

Step 2: In your favorite photo editing software (irfanview, in this case), I crop down to just the doggy's face.

Step 3: The image is just right, but it's still too big for an avatar (87 x 87), so I resized it down to 70 x70, sharpened it a little...and voila! A new doggy avatar.